MY UNDERTANDING OF MARX

                            My Interpretation of the Thought of Karl Marx

 

Part One: introduction

 

In a career that has spanned 71 years, ever since as a first semester freshman I took Willard Van Orman Quine’s course on symbolic logic, I have devoted extended periods of time to the study and interpretation of the writings of two great thinkers: Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx. To the thought of each I devoted two books and a number of lengthy essays. Kant was my first love and my first great challenge. When I had come to terms with his thought, I was sure I would never encounter another thinker as difficult to master or correctly to interpret. However, when I plunged into Das Kapital three years after publishing my second book on the philosophy of Kant, I found myself confronted with a task even more demanding and multidimensional than that posed by the Critique and the Grundlegung.

 

For better or for worse, I am content with my engagement with Kant. The books I have written and the series of YouTube lectures I have posted do as good a job of laying out my understanding of Kant’s philosophy as I am capable of. But despite 45 years of effort and many thousands of words, I still feel that I have somewhat failed to articulate the full complexity of my vision of Marx’s thought. I have decided therefore to make one last effort. I am moved to attempt this in part by my sense that I have been unsuccessful in persuading others of my reading of Marx’s work.

 

It will surprise none of you who have been following my blog that this reminds me of a story, and I think it may be appropriate to begin my effort by telling it once again. In 1956, when I was a graduate student in the Harvard University philosophy department, the graduate philosophy club invited Roy Wood Sellars to give us a lecture. Sellars was at that time quite ancient – 11 years younger than I am now, I believe – and retired from the University of Michigan. Some of you may be familiar with the name of his more famous son, Wilfrid Sellars. Roy Wood gave a long sad plaintive talk, the theme of which was that his Midwestern version of causal realism had not received a fair hearing in the journals because it had been eclipsed by the East Coast version of causal realism. We all sat there in stunned silence trying desperately to remember what causal realism was. The talk was not a success. And here I am, 65 years later, seemingly complaining that my version of Das Kapital has not received a fair hearing perhaps because Analytical Marxism has dominated the journals. Nothing changes, alas. At any rate, here we go.

 

I first read Volume One of Das Kapital in the spring of 1960 when I was preparing to co-teach a sophomore tutorial with Barrington Moore in Harvard’s newly established Social Studies program. I read it quickly and was unimpressed with it. Over the next 16 years I taught things by Marx frequently but it was always the early writings – The 1844 Manuscripts, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology. Then in the spring semester of 1977 I decided to teach a seminar at UMass on Classics of Critical Social Theory and assigned Volume One. When I reread it to prepare for the seminar, I was bowled over. I thought I had never read anything so brilliant, so complex, requiring so complicated an interpretation. I had what the French call an éclaircissement. On the spot, I decided to devote as much time as it took to struggling with the text and getting absolutely clear what I could see was going on in it. Marx, it seemed to me, had found a way to analyze the impossibly complex character of capitalist society and to capture its complexity literarily in those puzzling and unforgettable opening chapters.  To reach my goal, I would have to bring to bear on the text an understanding of philosophy, history, economics, and literary criticism, for all of these, I was convinced, had been integrated by Marx into a single seamless interpretation of capitalism.

 

The philosophy was no problem. That was, if I may steal a phrase from Eliza Doolittle, mother’s milk to me. And since the first course I taught at Harvard after getting a PhD in philosophy was a history of Western Europe from Caesar to Napoleon (don’t ask), I was sure I could handle the history. I have never in my life taken a course on literature, but at that point I had been married for 15 years to a gifted literary scholar and I had picked up some of the elements of literary theory from pillow talk, as it were. The economics, however, posed a problem. 

 

I could handle the writings of Smith and Ricardo easily enough, but as it happened, this was just the time when a number of brilliant mathematical economists around the world were bringing modern analytical techniques to bear on the work of those great classical political economists as well as on that of Marx himself. For reasons that I shall explain later, the mathematical tool they used most often was not the calculus of the neoclassical economic school but rather linear algebra.  I had studied a fair amount of calculus in college but had never engaged with linear algebra, so as soon as I had submitted my grades in December 1976, I bought a linear algebra textbook and spend the month of January teaching myself the subject. And then I was off on my adventure.

 

What Marx had done in Capital was to bring to bear on the analysis of capitalism the old philosophical distinction between Appearance and Reality, a distinction first introduced systematically into philosophy by Plato. Like Plato, Marx faced an extremely complicated expositional problem. He had to begin at the level of appearances, penetrate those appearances to reveal the underlying reality, struggle successfully against the resistance of his readers to giving up their false belief in the appearances, while deploying literary techniques designed to capture this complex structure in a discourse that could speak simultaneously to audiences who had achieved different degrees of insight into reality. All of this, I recognized almost immediately, Marx had achieved brilliantly in the opening 10 chapters or so of Volume One. My job would be to lay this out clearly and analytically, somewhat like a medical student dissecting a corpse to display the complex structure of nerves and blood vessels and bones and organs that in the living body comprised a graceful functioning structure.

 

However, after I had mastered linear algebra sufficiently to be able to read the work of Sraffa, Morishima, Pasinetti, Brody, Abraham-Frois and Berrebi, and the others, I discovered there was a problem neither Marx nor any of his interpreters and disciples had recognized: a way had to be found to integrate the modern mathematical reinterpretation of the classical school with the philosophical, historical, and literary understandings that Marx had achieved. To put the point in a deliberately provocative and seemingly paradoxical fashion, a way had to be found to introduce the literary criticism into the equations. The recognition of this problem and my initial admittedly somewhat elementary efforts to solve it are what sets my reading of Marx off from that of every other commentator I have ever encountered.  This essay is one last effort to make the case, as it were, for my "Midwestern version of causal realism.”

ABD FINALLY, THE SIXTH

The time is come to complete my memory tour of old Paris with an account of my walk around the sixth arrondissement, but let me respond quickly to comments on earlier accounts. First, I referred to the chorus in the Place des Vosges as the Gay Men’s Chorus because that is how they refer to themselves. Second, Eric’s lovely story about his restaurant experience called to mind an embarrassing visit Susie and I paid to a restaurant recommended by my sister. The restaurant, in the fourth, is called Les Philosophes – clearly I had to try it. To start my dinner I ordered filets d’hareng – herring in short. An entire fairly large crock of herring arrived. I was supposed to take an appropriate amount from the crock, place it on my plate, and eat it. But I thought the whole serving was for me and I certainly was not going to let the restaurant down by leaving some of it uneaten so I set to it. The waiters courteously and tactfully said nothing as I wolfed down the entire crock of herring. They did not even charge me extra! I thought that last was a touch of real class.

 

On to the sixth. You will recall that each arrondissement is larger than the one preceding it and since I live in the fifth I would have to walk a bit even to start my circumnavigation. This was clearly going to be an adventure. I started by walking up to Place Maubert and turning east along Boulevard Saint Germain until I reached the eastern flank of the sixth, Boulevard St. Michel. As I was completing my circumnavigation of the fifth, I walked along the east side of that north – south boulevard but this time I crossed over to the west side and started walking south up the hill. I passed Place de la Sorbonne and the entrance to the Jardin du Luxembourg and kept walking uphill until I finally reached the southernmost tip of the Jardin, where, as you will recall, I saw the Port Royal RER station. Then, turning right I set out on the very long southern flank of the sixth, the famous Boulevard Montparnasse. If you look at the map you can see that this is a really long straight stretch. I knew from having consulted a map that I wanted to turn onto rue de Sèvres, and every time I crossed a big intersection I checked the street signs on the sides of buildings to see whether I had reached it but no luck. At long last I came to rue de Sèvres and turned north – or more precisely northeast because the street angles in, making the southern flank of the sixth much bigger than the northern flank.

 

After passing the tiny Vanneau Metro station and the large discount department store, Bon Marché, where Susie and I bought a pair of little night tables 17 years ago, I came to the big Sèvres-Babylone station, at which point the street bears even further toward the east. Almost immediately I took a left onto a very small street with the lovely name rue des Saints-Pères.  This street would have taken me all the way to the river but once again I cut my circumnavigation short by turning right on Boulevard Saint Germain. Walking now on the southern side of that street I passed through Place de l’Odéon with its three movie complexes and continued on to the corner of Boulevard St. Michel.  Crossing the street, I left the sixth and entered the fifth, walked past Cluny - the Museum of the Middle Ages – and made my way home.

 

My fondest memory of the sixth comes not from this walk but from a restaurant Susie and I went to that is just off the route of the walk. When the long stretch from Boulevard Montparnasse is almost done, I pass the little street called rue du Cherche-Midi.  There you can find a small restaurant with the odd double name Josephine Chez Dumonet.   We went there because the restaurant was reputed to have the best boeuf bourguignon in Paris and it is indeed wonderful (although pride forces me to say not quite as wonderful as the dish I cooked in my little apartment over the course of two days one time.) The portions are so large that the restaurant actually offers you on the menu the option of a half portion, which turned out to be more than enough. When Paris reopens and we are finally able to return one more time before selling our apartment, that is one of the restaurants I plan to revisit.

 

There are actually one or two more walks I have taken but I think this is enough of reminiscences and strolls down memory lane. Tomorrow in a complete change of tone and subject, I plan to launch on a multi-day sequence of posts in which I will attempt to capture once and for all my extremely complex and quite distinctive interpretation of Das Kapital. 

AROUND THE FOURTH

Susie and I very much consider ourselves left bank Parisians but the fourth arrondissement is in an odd way a kind of extension of the left bank even though it lies north of the Seine so one morning I decided to walk around its borders. This turned out to be a very interesting adventure even though the route is the shortest of my various walks. Leaving my building, I turned right and walked to the quays. I crossed over and turned right, walking along the river all away to the point at which Blvd. St. Germain begins. Turning left, I walked across a little bridge to the tip of ïle St. Louis and then further across another little bridge to the right bank. Walking up Boulevard Henri Quatre, I came to the west side of Place de la Bastille.  Across on the other side I could see the big opera house that competes with the main opera house downtown. At this point in the morning traffic is getting heavy so carefully crossing streets I continued north. Looking to my left, I could see a famous restaurant – Bofinger - the site of one of my most embarrassing gustatory goofs.  Bofinger is a fin de siècle restaurant with a famously elaborate ladies’ room (which of course I have never seen). The pièce de résistance is a huge platter of assorted raw shellfish set in a bed of ice. Naturally I ordered it. When it came I looked for the cocktail sauce and when I could not see any I asked for some. The waiter looked at me very oddly and finally brought me a bottle of ketchup, making it quite clear that I was a tasteless, clueless gauche American tourist. It was not a successful outing.

 

Two short blocks north of Place to la Bastille is a little street going off to the left with the odd name “rue du pas de la mule.”  Fairly quickly the street becomes the northern flank of the most famous part of the fourth, Place des Vosges, a fabulously expensive residential site much sought after by the in crowd in Paris. My loveliest memory of Place des Vosges is a visit there during what is called in Paris Fȇte de la Musique.  Held on June 21, the first day of summer, this is a time when all of Paris comes out into the streets to play music and listen to it. Everything is free, even concerts in expensive venues by world-famous groups. In one place you will find competing amateur rock ensembles, around the corner a solitary violinist playing away. On the evening that Susie and I went to the Place des Vosges, there was a string quartet playing Beethoven, a gay men’s chorus singing, and a small rock trio in another corner of the Place. One of the two or three greatest concerts I have ever heard was a free concert by the world-famous Tallis Singers in the Musée d’Orsay.  They performed the Miserere of Alleghri, and I can still hear a solo soprano voice ascending seemingly effortlessly to the heavens as we sat on the stone banquettes far from the chorus. It was a magical moment.

 

When rue du pas de la mule passes Place des Vosges, it becomes rue des Francs Bourgeois, the traditional Jewish section of old Paris where my relatives lived a hundred fifty years ago. After a long walk it turns again into a new street – rue Rambuteau.  All this while I had been walking along the northern boundary of the fourth, and very soon I passed the north flank of the famous Pompideau Museum, which, thanks to the odd imagination of some architect, has the pipes and ducts on the outside rather than on the inside of the museum. Another block and I came to the northwest corner of the fourth and turned left to walk down Boulevard de Sebastopol.  This took me all the way to the river on the right bank. Now I walked for a bit east until it was time to cross the river to the flower market, strangely named for Queen Elizabeth of England. Past the old headquarters of the Paris police (who have apparently since moved to new quarters) and then catty corner across the large open space in front of Notre Dame called the Parvis Notre Dame, from which it was a short walk home.

 

For a long time I thought I had successfully circumnavigated the fourth, but looking at a map one day I discovered that there is a piece of the fourth on the eastern edge that I had missed – a sort of wedge shaped space, the point of which is in Place de la Bastille and the base of which is along the river. Just to keep myself honest, I adjusted my walk to encompass that little piece once but it did not add any charm to the experience so I went back to my original route on subsequent walks around the fourth.

 

Tomorrow I will describe my longest and most adventuresome effort – a circumnavigation of the sixth. There are several more walks that I have done in Paris but I think that will be enough. The truth is that I am no longer capable of taking these walks as I once did but I will miss having them available nonetheless.

I CONTINUE TO REMINISCE

After taking my standard walk a number of times I decided to try something more adventuresome, and after a look at a map I hit upon a route that would take me around the borders of the fifth arrondissement. I set out the same way, walking down my little street to the quays but then, instead of crossing the street and turning left I simply turned right and set out to the east. When I reached the point at which Boulevard St. Germain begins, I found myself facing the Institute of the Arab World, a large center of all things Arabic that has a lovely rooftop café from which one can see a great deal of old Paris. Continuing on, I passed the branch of the University of Paris devoted to science – the Pierre and Marie Curie campus – and then the rather pathetic zoo that Paris maintains, but this in turn brought me to the magnificent Botanical Garden or Jardin des Plantes where Susie and I have spent many happy hours wandering among the plantings. Susie began life as a botanist and loves to visit the Botanical Garden whenever we are in Paris. One of the truly strange effects of aging on her mind is that even when she can no longer remember the common names of plants, flowers, and trees she seems to have no difficulty remembering their Latin botanical names.

 

At this point on my walk I angle not quite 90° to the right and start up the Boulevard d l’Höpital, which, since it is going away from the river is uphill. Before too long I angle right again onto Boulevard St. Marcel, which forms part of the southern border of the fifth. At this point I am walking roughly southwest, until I reached the intersection with the beginning of Avenue des Gobelins.  One more slight turn to the right and now there is a long stretch of Boulevard du Port Royal, which takes me past a large hospital complex on my right until finally I come to the Port Royal RER station. The RER is a suburban light rail that brings workers into central Paris every day and by the time I reach it men and women are streaming out of the station heading to the hospital and other places to begin the work day. This is the southwest corner of the fifth, and a right turn gets me onto Boulevard St. Michel. As I walk north on the right hand side of the Boulevard, the great Jardin de Luxembourg is on my left. Susie and I have spent countless enjoyable hours in the Luxembourg Gardens having wine at the café or watching children and adults sail their boats in the circular pond in its middle (even, on one occasion, seeing a man sailing a remote-controlled submarine in the pond – I posted the picture I took of that on this blog some years ago.) Years ago I bought a fancy picnic basket and once Susie and I loaded it with tasty cheeses, pates, bread, and pastries, added a bottle of red for me and a bottle of white for her, and had a picnic under the trees in the Jardin.  Truth to tell, it was more fun eating at the café and we did not have Renoir painting a picture of us, but it made a good story.

 

To complete my circumnavigation of the fifth I would have had to walk all the way to the river before turning right and making my way home but on this first and all subsequent occasions when I reached the entrance to the Gardens I decided to turn right on rue Soufflot and walk up the hill to Place du Pantheon.  When I reached the Pantheon I bore around to the left on northern face of it until I reached a little street called rue Valette.  This plunges precipitously downhill, turning into rue des Carmes, before ending at Place Maubert, from which it was a short distance up rue Maitre Albert to our building.

 

The first time I did this walk it took me just about an hour, even though it seemed a great deal longer than that because the scene had changed so many times on its way. I felt that I had accomplished something very daring and immediately began thinking about other circumnavigations that I might attempt. Tomorrow I will tell you about my one venture into Paris across the river – my circumnavigation of the fourth.

PARIS WALKS PART TWO

Before I continue telling you about my Paris walks, it occurred to me that I should say something about the geographic layout of Paris for those not familiar with the city. Paris is a roughly circular city with the Seine flowing through it from lower right up to the middle and then down again to lower left. It is divided into 20 administrative units called arrondissements, arranged in a spiral. The first arrondissement includes the Louvre and such in the middle of the city and then the other 19 continue in a spiral that turns right to left, each one growing a little bit larger. The second, third, and fourth are laid out to the east of the first on the north side of the river, which is called the right bank because the water flows from East to West toward the ocean. The fifth, sixth, and seventh, each of which is slightly larger than the preceding, are arranged right to left on the left bank.  Then the spiral crosses over again to the right bank and the eighth through twelfth go left to right until once again they come to the river. Back over to the left bank for the thirteenth through fifteenth and then the last five continue on the right bank across the northern flank of Paris. The lower the number the more interesting the city is and generally speaking the higher the prices for apartments. The Paris slums are called banlieus and lie outside the city itself around the northern flank. My walks took me to the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh arrondissements. My tiny apartment – 330 ft.² – is in the fifth, you will recall.

 

My second and third walks are just variations of the first. On several occasions what I have done after setting out is to walk over to the right bank past Notre Dame, turn left and walk all the way to the Place de la Concorde bridge on the right bank in front of the Louvre. Then I would cross over to the left bank and walk home. The other variation, which is really quite interesting, is to walk home along Boulevard St. Germain, rather than along the quays. After some time in the seventh (always looking unsuccessfully for Serena Williams, who has an apartment there) I would come to the two cafés made famous by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the café Flores and the café Deux Magots, on the north side of the Boulevard across the street from Brasserie Lipp.  I have never actually had so much as a coffee at either of those cafés but my heart beats a little bit faster when I see them. Then it is on to Place de L’Odéon, with no fewer than three movie complexes. This part of the walk also takes me past the Cluny – Museum of the Middle Ages.  For a long time there was a small musical group at Cluny that gave mid – day concerts of medieval music, which Susie and I attended as often as we could. The Cluny also has a bookshop where we bought a little reproduction of part of a famous medieval tapestry which for years has served as the tablecloth on our small dining table in our apartment. Then it is back to Place Maubert and home.

 

This is probably a good time to mention a change that took place in the streets of this part of Paris half a century ago. During the French version of the student uprisings of 1968, protesting students tore up the cobblestones of the old streets and used them to make barricades. The Paris administration responded by paving over all the cobblestones, which made the streets more amenable to scooters and bicycles but deprived them of much of their charm. Real old timers can still recall the cobblestone streets in the fifth and sixth.

 

These first walks are pretty tame but tomorrow I will talk about some of the more adventurous walks I have taken around old Paris early in the morning.

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

Well, it is now definite. Susie and I will sell the little Paris apartment that we bought 17 years ago. During the first 13 or 14 of those years, until I was well into my 80s, I would take long early morning walks in the old part of Paris – the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh arrondissements. Leaving at six in the morning or a little bit later, I would walk for an hour or so, watching Paris wake up and start its day. I had seven or eight different walks, and in this and subsequent posts I am going to describe them, one by one, as a way of enjoying them one more time and finally saying goodbye to Paris. These posts have no political significance whatsoever and the usual commentators may therefore wish to take a vacation from the blog and be about their other business but perhaps there is someone out there reading these descriptions for whom they will evoke pleasant memories.

 

The apartment is on the ground floor of a 17^th century building in the fifth arrondissement on a little street running from the river to Place Maubert called rue Maître Albert. That was not always its name. When I bought an 18^th-century map of Paris to frame and hang in the apartment as decoration, I discovered that the street used to be called rue perdu (the lost street.) The current name, which was given to it as part of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, is an allusion to the great medieval scholastic philosopher and teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, who is believed to have taught nearby. I have always liked that fact about our little street.

 

My first walk begins by turning right as I exit the building and walk to the quays. I cross the street and turn left, walking west along the river, first past Notre Dame, which is right there almost at the end of the street, then past Shakespeare and Company, the famous English language bookstore where I used to hang out in the spring of 1955, past Place St. Michel, past the Academie Française and – across the river on the right bank – the Louvre, past the Musée d’Orsay, which began its life as a train station, past the row of large batobus parked for the night on the Seine with the two little ones at the end named Jean Gabin and Yves Montand (pictures of which I have posted on this blog) and finally to the Pont de la Concorde, which leads across the river to Place de la Concorde.  At that point I would stop, look left at the National Assembly, turn around and walk home.

 

That was my very first walk and for years it remained my basic go-to walk.  Early in the morning I would see joggers, tourists pulling roller bags and heading for the RER station to take the train to the airport, couples who had been out all night and were now reeling, slightly tipsy, toward their beds, and the occasional Gendarme.

 

By the time I returned home, Susie would be up, we would have breakfast and the day would begin.

A LIFE WELL LIVED

An idle thought sent me looking on YouTube for Pete Seeger's performance of Cumberland Mountain.Bear Chase, and that in turn send me to the Wikipedia page on him.  Seeger was one of the iconic figures of my youth. He died at the age of 94, just seven years old than I am now.  As I read the long entry on him, I thought to myself "a life well lived."